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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

THIS HERE IS LOVE

Princess Joy L. Perry

A Novel

Three peopletwo enslaved, one indenturedliving beside each other, struggling against their circumstances, trying to bend destiny.

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America's character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.

Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother's only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.

David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother's shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father's dream of emancipation for the entire family.

Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain's colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person's life.

A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner's daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?

All three come together on Jack's land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.

Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

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Book Published 2025-08-01 by W.W. Norton & Company

Comments

In the manner of Edward P. Jones's The Known World, this sweeping and greathearted novel presents a cast of unforgettable characters driven by their hopes and yearnings, men and women who in the face of the suffering and loss and violence of bondage manage to go about the 'brave business of love.' This is a beautiful book.

Perry's searing first novel never flinches from the brutality of plantation life. With steely empathy, Perry probes the complexities and contradictions of a society built on bondage. Perry's intersecting plots are gripping, but what's more impressive is the way she guides us through her characters' emotional depths.

In the tenderest of prose and the most compelling of storytelling, Princess Joy L. Perry has reached back centuries to our earliest national moments, writing of the confusion that occurs when power crosses lovebut oh, how that love can survive! A love at the beginning and at the end. A love which is the sweetest human wisdom, the most merciful of legacies.

This Here is Love is an utterly riveting intergenerational saga of love, betrayal, theft and resilience. Princess Joy L. Perry laces every chapter with fireworks and unforgettable characters?all off-kilter, wounded and searching for solace in this epic tale of slavery and freedom.

Epic. Meticulous research into the time period down to the clothing, the food, the landscape, and the lifestyle create a believably vivid setting.

It's hard to believe that this is Perry's first novel, so effectively does it pull readers deep into the lives of its evolving, powerful, multifaceted characters. Readers who enjoy the work of either [Zora Neale] Hurston or [Richard] Wright will love this novel.

Remarkable ... A marvelous tale about the limits of freedom.

If there is comfort in chronicling the first century of the American Slavery project, it's that it is written by one of its daughters. In This Here is Love, Princess Joy L. Perry refuses to shy away from the cruelties of surviving the realities of 17th century America and has charted the terrible truths of her character's impossible choices?even as they map a journey towards their own freedom, their futures, their shared humanity. In these pages, we have love rooted and rebuilt in the land that stripped these compelling characters of almost all they have, and a blueprint for how hope may still move us forward.

[A] commanding debut novel... These characters shine in their courage and resistance, creating families and communities that enabled them to endure.

A luscious storyteller, Perry brings to light the profound moral and emotional dilemmas her characters face, making the reader feel the weight of their impossible choices and everyday courage. A fierce and luminous debut.